Emrys opened his mouth to protest, found nothing to say, and closed it again with a grunt.
"That makes absolutely no sense," he finally muttered. "It's been almost forty years since we last saw each other. I've had time to change. Using my childhood reactions to guess this kind of thing isn't logical."
"Almost forty years," his mother repeated. Her voice cracked a little on the last word, and she smiled to hide it. "I know. I counted them, you know. But I know you well enough to guess what you do with your eyebrows when you're annoyed. A mother's instinct doesn't care about logic."
He wanted to say something clever. Instead, he reached out and grabbed her wrist.
He needed to check that she was really there, and that he wasn't about to find himself alone in the middle of this silence.
She said nothing. She laid her other hand over his.
"Me too," she murmured after a moment. "I keep telling myself I'm going to wake up."
Emrys felt his throat tighten again and snorted to hide it.
"If you start crying, I'm leaving."
"Ungrateful child. I listened to you whine for half an hour without complaining, you know."
"I had my reasons."
"I don't doubt it, my big boy." She squeezed his hand. "Come. Sit down for a bit, we'll be more comfortable."
She led him a few steps further, to the water's edge, where the ground was clear enough for them to sit, and he let himself be led without a word.
Once seated, he realized he was still trembling a little. Yet he felt lighter than he had in decades.
His mother rubbed his back, once, quickly, the way you do with a child you're comforting.
"You've gotten thin," she said, pinching his arm through his sleeve with the scandalized look of someone who has just discovered a crime.
"Huh? What are you talking about?" he said, dumbfounded.
"First of all, I haven't gotten thin." He puffed out his chest. "I've actually become very muscular, I'll have you know. And second, you know perfectly well I don't need to eat."
"Muscular?" She felt his arm with her fingertips, looking skeptical. "Really? Are you sure it's not your armor that's muscular?"
"Heresy!!"
"What? I'm only stating the facts."
"I assure you I'm a certified, licensed and inveterate gym rat."
"Okay, if you say so, my big boy, I believe you." She was laughing, and he laughed with her, a laugh still hoarse. Then her smile softened. "Let me be a mother a little longer, Emrys. I missed so many things."
He didn't know what to say. He leaned his shoulder against hers, and they stayed like that for a while, not speaking. The silence no longer bothered him.
After a few moments, he felt her fingers move up to the collar of his shirt, which was sticking out of his armor, and tug at it to straighten it.
She smoothed it, un-wrinkled it, then pulled it the other way with a sigh.
"You're making it worse," he pointed out.
"I'm improving it."
"You're pulling it in every direction."
"Let me do it, I'm thirty-nine years behind on your collar."
He stopped protesting. He stayed still, head slightly lowered, and let her fix his clothes the way she did when he was little.
"By the way," his mother said after a while, "I wasn't joking earlier. That hood, is it a choice or an accident?"
"It's got aura."
"Far be it from me to criticize Dubs's work, but it looks like an old bedsheet reused to make a piece of clothing. The same goes for the rest of the shroud."
Wait, how does she know Dubs? Emrys thought. Well, it's not like he isn't famous all across Britannia.
"And the mask?"
"That one, I'll let you defend. I'm lenient, but not a liar."
"I defend it very well on my own," he replied, crossing his arms. "It's the pinnacle of simple aesthetics. Everyone says so."
"Who's everyone? The people of Ulster, who respect you so much they forced a crown on you? Honestly, I still can't believe you're a king."
"And why not? I'm a very responsible person, you know."
She looked at him, pursing her lips, visibly trying not to laugh.
"Responsible," she repeated, very seriously. "Of course."
He could tell she didn't believe a word of it, but he started laughing too.
This stupid conversation was worth all the grand speeches he had prepared for years in anticipation of this moment.
His mother leaned over and gave him a little shoulder bump, and he bumped her back, harder than he meant to. She nearly fell over sideways and wagged a finger at him, laughing.
"See? Real muscles," he said, very pleased with himself.
"Those are mostly the shoulder bumps of a kid who wants to win," she replied. "But fine. I take back what I said about the armor."
He smiled broadly under his mask and realized his cheeks hurt.
It had been a long time since he'd smiled for so long.
The question was still burning his tongue. He had promised himself not to spoil this moment with interrogations.
He had promised himself.
The promise lasted about two minutes.
"Mom."
"No," she said without turning her head.
"I haven't asked you anything."
"You're going to ask me who that woman is and what she was doing here before you arrived."
He closed his mouth. He felt like a kid caught red-handed, and the worst part was, he was happy about it.
"You're unpleasant," he said. "I wanted to do it with class."
"You've never done anything with class, my heart." She finally turned to him. "It's not something you need to worry about. Really. I'm not saying it to shut the door on you. I'm saying it because it's the truth."
It was an answer, and she gave it so calmly that he couldn't even get annoyed. He scratched the back of his neck, under his hood, sighing with a half-smile.
He could have let it go. A few minutes earlier, he probably would have. But the woman had appeared right in front of him, in this place he had searched for nearly forty years, and that, he couldn't ignore.
"I already know a bit about that woman."
"Oh yes?"
"She's the one who asked Dubs to forge the Coffin of Eternal Darkness." He shrugged. "It was the use of the coffin that ended the Holy War. So in a way, she's the one who stopped it."
His mother listened without interrupting, without the slightest reaction.
"In a way," she repeated, very gently.
"I don't care about the war," Emrys went on. "It's over, and good riddance. I wasn't even actively taking part in it. It's her that intrigues me. When I met her at Dubs's, I felt something I'd never felt before. No anger, no fear, no joy, nothing at all. It was the Void. And this same person knows two of the people closest to me." He clenched his fist on his knee. "You have to admit that's suspicious."
His mother didn't answer right away. She placed her hand over his clenched fist and stroked it with her thumb.
"No," she said at last. "It's not suspicious." She looked him straight in the eyes, or rather at the place where they should have been behind the mask. "In due time I'll tell you how and why she knows me, but as for Dubs, it's not for me to explain. If you want answers, she's the one you have to ask, Emrys. Only she can give them to you."
"I would have," he replied with a touch of irony. "If she didn't run away every time she sees me."
His mother burst out laughing.
A real laugh, open and hearty, that bent her shoulders forward and made the hand she kept on his tremble.
"What?" he asked, baffled. "What did I say?"
"Nothing," she gasped, wiping the corner of her eye. "It's just… oh, Emrys. You talk as if she were the problem.
"Well, she is, isn't she? She disappears as soon as I get close, she shows up when I'm not expecting it…"
"Oh dear, and he's going to tell me he's responsible. No matter which way I turn it, it's your fault, my heart."
He blinked.
"Excuse me?
"On your first meeting," she said, raising a finger, with the seriousness of someone listing a child's misdeeds, "you tried to violate her privacy by using Structural Grasp on her."
Emrys froze.
"And on the second," she continued, raising a second finger before he could answer, "you literally attacked her with a Rankyaku. Frankly, I think she was very patient."
"I never—"
He stopped. Under his mask, he blushed.
"Okay, fine," he said in a smaller voice. "The first time, it was maybe a bit… intrusive. But I just wanted to know what she looked like and what race she was. And she was giving off something so weird that I wanted to understand what it was…"
"Exactly."
"Exactly what?"
"You do it without asking whether the other person agrees." She leaned toward him a little, her voice softer. "Imagine someone looking at you from the inside. Your body, your magic, your history. Without asking, without warning. Would you like that?"
"No," he admitted after a silence, a bit sheepish. "No, I guess it must be unpleasant."
"There you go."
"But she was really hard to read, you know. I was wary." He made a vague gesture. "And as for the Rankyaku, I just reacted on instinct, she shouldn't have surprised me."
"I know."
"So you understand."
"What I understand is that you're still the same stubborn brat." She pinched his cheek through the mask, and he let out an indignant yelp. "Your instincts may be very good, but that doesn't give you the right to attack every stranger who makes you uncomfortable. She was patient. Very patient."
"She could have warned me, too."
"Oh come on, Rysrys, you're not going to blame her for being polite enough not to interrupt our reunion?" She raised an eyebrow.
Then a moment later she started to snicker.
"You're making the face you make when you know you've lost a debate."
"I'm not losing. I'm thinking about my strategy."
"Of course, my heart. Of course."
He grumbled something unintelligible, and his mother was kind enough not to comment. She took his hand again and patted it, as if to tell him the argument was over and he could stop defending himself. She gave him a few seconds to digest, then added, more gently:
"You were already like that as a kid. As soon as someone told you that you were wrong, you'd go sulk in a corner pretending you were thinking.
"That's slander. I wasn't like that."
"You still are."
He smiled under his mask. He remembered that from his childhood, the way she let him talk nonsense until the end before gently setting him back on the right path. He had thought about it hundreds of times over all those years, and it was exactly the same. He felt good, sitting there beside her, being scolded like a kid, and he would gladly have gone on like that for hours.
Well, I can't deny she's right.
Twice, he had done things that, yes, would normally have earned him immediate hostility.
Then he finally heard what she had just said. Not the lecture, not the gentle reproach. The words themselves.
Structural Grasp. Rankyaku.
His smile vanished.
"Wait."
"Hm?"
"Wait a second."
He turned fully toward her. His voice had changed. It was lower, more serious.
"How do you know that?"
His mother didn't answer.
"How do you know I used Structural Grasp on her? How do you even know what Structural Grasp is?" He spoke slowly, weighing each word. "And the same for Rankyaku. How do you know what that is?"
He broke off. He had the feeling that something no longer held together, without being able to say what.
"I let it slide that you know who Dubs is and that he's the one who forged my armor, because he's famous. I also told myself that if you knew what I did to the woman, it's because she told you. But these are techniques… There are only two people still alive who should normally know them."
The silence fell again, but it wasn't the same anymore. His mother was no longer laughing. She wasn't looking away either. She simply looked at him, with an expression he couldn't understand, a little embarrassed, but mostly gentle, like someone who had known for a long time that this question would eventually come.
His Haki gave him little back. His mother was calm, steady, almost too peaceful. No fear. No anger. Nothing of what you sense in someone who has just been caught out. He didn't know whether that was reassuring or worrying.
He didn't move. He just squeezed his mother's hand a little tighter, as if to show her he wasn't angry, that he only wanted to understand.
Emrys stayed there, his hand still resting on his mother's, waiting for her to answer.